THE biggest problem with us is that we have allowed ourselves to become other people’s shopping baskets.
We never question anything thrown into the basket as long as our owner will pay for them.
The reason is that we have internalised the lie that everything that comes from the West is good.
And by doing so, we keep on endorsing the lie that the West is the international standard; that they lead and we follow.
Now, having been tuned to serve as post-colonial defenders of Western thinking, we accept to preach their new gender discourse without the slightest reservation, let alone introspection.
Gender studies and ‘queer theory’
Gender theory came to the fore first as a feminist theory but has subsequently come to include the investigation of all gender and sexual categories and identities.
Feminist gender theory followed slightly behind the re-emergence of political feminism in the US and Western Europe during the 1960s.
Political feminism of the so-called ‘second wave’ had as its emphasis practical concerns with the rights of women in contemporary societies, women’s identity, and the representation of women in media and culture.
These causes converged with early literary feminist practice, characterised by Elaine Showalter as ‘gynocriticism’, which emphasised the study and canonical inclusion of works by female authors as well as the depiction of women in male-authored canonical texts.
Feminist gender theory is post-modern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of Western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions and alternative epistemological positions meant to change the social order.
In the context of post-modernism, gender theorists, led by the work of Judith Butler, initially viewed the category of ‘gender’ as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performance.
The biological distinction between man and woman eventually came under the same scrutiny by theorists who reached a similar conclusion — the sexual categories are products of culture and as such help create social reality rather than simply reflect it.
Masculine gender theory, as a separate enterprise, has focused largely on social, literary and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities.
Such work generally lacks feminists’ activist stance and tends to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity.
The so-called ‘Men’s Movement’, inspired by the work of Robert Bly, among
others, was more practical than theoretical and has had only limited impact on gender discourse.
The impetus for the ‘Men’s Movement’ came largely as a response to the critique of masculinity and male domination that runs throughout feminism and the upheaval of the 1960s, a period of crisis in American social ideology that has required a reconsideration of gender roles.
Having long served as the de facto ‘subject’ of Western thought, male identity and masculine gender theory awaits serious investigation as a particular, and no longer universally representative, field of inquiry.
I am on record for saying, not a single African language has an equivalent word for gender; implying that this concept does not exist in African worldview and roles are not attributed to sexual orientation at all.
I don’t know how many times I must stress that titles such as ‘mother’ and ‘father’ do not necessarily reflect sex identities. If anything they represent role or function.
We serve our societies through what we do, not how we are biologically constituted.
And in whatever we are able to do, the bottom-line is that we do so to complement rather that compete with each other.
As you can witness, all these theories encourage competing, even fighting, to outsmart each other in line with the central capitalist ethos.
Much of what theoretical energy of masculine gender theory currently possesses comes from its ambiguous relationship with the field of ‘queer theory’.
‘Queer theory’ is not synonymous with gender theory, nor even with the overlapping fields of gay and lesbian studies, but does share many of their concerns with normative definitions of man, woman and sexuality.
‘Queer theory’ questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative sexual ideology.
To be ‘queer’ becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked or otherwise critiqued.
‘Queering’ can be enacted on behalf of all non-normative sexualities and identities as well, all that is considered by the dominant paradigms of culture to be alien, strange, unfamiliar, transgressive, odd — in short, queer.
Here Africans, as the primary target of such affront, are expected to redefine sexual orientations in such a way that we allow all sorts of perversions as long as they satisfy new individual sexual orientations.
Sex is no longer a procreative process but a self-indulgent act permitting anyone to bed anything as dictated by his or her hormones.
Democratising sex!
This is sanctioned under the human rights banner.
Do you now understand how allowing such theories into your school’s curriculum allows the education system to perpetuate the same colonial agenda.
“The ideas we have in our head about what constitutes male-ness, female-ness, and what constitutes ‘normal’ are all socially constructed.
“As Hennessy Youngman reminds us, it’s like your father who tells you all these stories when you’re young. What’s good (or) what’s evil. And then queer theory comes along and is like ‘f**k your father, f**k his narratives, and f**k his essential structures…in bed’.”
I believe madness must have a limit.
Allowing such things to become subject of discussion is, in my view, as good as crossing the red line.